HTTP

HTTP (the Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an ASCII-text, client-server protocol which is the most prevalent standard used on the World Wide Web for communications that take place between a web browser (a program which acts as an HTTP client) and a web server (a program which acts as an HTTP server). Two versions of HTTP are still in use:

• W3C RFC 1945, Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0, which specifies how the browser and server communicate with each other
• W3C RFC 2616, Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1, which adds caching and keep-alive connections to the original specification

In HTTP messaging, an HTTP client sends an ASCII-text HTTP request message to an HTTP server program, which in turn sends back an ASCII-text HTTP response in reply. The HTTP request includes the following:

1. the version of HTTP being used (1.0 or 1.1)
2. the IP address (or equivalent DNS name) of the computer on which the target HTTP server is running
3. the TCP port number on which the HTTP server software is listening
4. the relative file path of the file or resource being requested
5. optionally, additional and arbitrary parameters which further refine the request

The HTTP response includes the following:

1. a status code indicating whether the request succeeded or not
2. MIME type identifying the format of the byte stream (payload, or resource) being returned, if any
3. length in bytes of the payload (resource) being returned, if any
4. optionally, the file stream, or byte array, of the payload (resource) being returned
5. whether the TCP connection is being held open or not

Both HTTP requests and responses are limited to using the ASCII character set, but by using character encoding algorithms, the response payload can be tricked into sending binary information such as image or audio. When binary files are sent, the byte stream is still ASCII, but the binary byte array is first encoded as ASCII text by the HTTP server for transport across the internet and must then be decoded back to its binary format upon reception by the HTTP client.

Web browsers are not the only type of HTTP client program. HTTP is also used by the web robots of search engines to index the World Wide Web, as well as by so-called spam-bots which scrape web pages to obtain information for malicious purposes.

HTTP is one of several well-known TCP applications which can ride on top of the internet's Transmission Control Protocol, and HTTP is assigned the well-known TCP port number of 80. This is important, though perhaps not obvious, because browsing to a URL such as http://diatom.ansp.org/ is actually equivalent to browsing to http://diatom.ansp.org:80/. If two web server programs were to execute simultaneously on a single host computer, it would be necessary for one of them to be configured to use a less-known TCP port number above 8000 (since well-known TCP ports are supposed to be below 8000). A URL such as http://diatom.ansp.org:8080/ could be used to address an HTTP request to the second web server on a computer whose DNS name is diatom.ansp.org, assuming the second HTTP server software were configured to listen on TCP port 8080. If two web servers both run on one computer and both attempt to listen for requests on TCP port 80 (the HTTP default), neither will work correctly.

HTTP's original purpose was the transfer of Hypertext Markup Language and other page description methods such as cascading style sheets (CSS). HTTP is a relatively simple protocol, which relies on the Transmission Control Protocol to ensure its traffic is carried, free from errors, over Internet Protocol networks. It works in the same manner if the users or servers are connected to the public Internet, an intranet, or an extranet. HTTP needs to be supplemented to provide security of the message transfer.

The World Wide Web is more than HTML and HTTP alone. It includes a wide range of administrative techniques, performance-enhancing methods such as web caches and content distribution networks, and and has a robust caching system.

History

HTTP was created at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 as a way to share hypertext documents. Around 1992 with the availability of the first web browser (Mosaic), HTTP and HTML together began to be used by other sites, primarily in the scientific world. The availability of the Mosaic web browser and the NCSA HTTPd web server, both developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications by Marc Andreessen, were key to the explosion in popularity of HTTP and HTML that followed.

The first (1990) version of HTTP, called HTTP/0.9, was a bare-bones protocol for raw data transfer across the Internet. HTTP/1.0 (1996) improved the protocol by allowing payload message to be in a self-describing language HTML, along with the addition of metadata about the location of the requested information and other directives on how to handle the request and response.

However, HTTP/1.0 was still limited, lacking [[proxy (computer}|proxies]], web caches, persistent connections for repeated messaging, and virtual web servers. To meet those needs, HTTP/1.1 was developed.

Technical details

The HTTP protocol follows a client-server model, where the client issues a request for a resource to the server. Requests and responses consist of several headers and, optionally, a body. Resources are identified using a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier).

Example conversation

The following is a typical client-server conversation of the kind which is carried out every time a page is loaded in a web browser. In this case, the user has entered the address 'http://www.lth.se/' in his browser and clicked. A 'request' is made by the browser to port 80 on the server www.lth.se, and the server responds with the home page. Comments are in italics and are not part of the actual conversation.

Request:

GET / HTTP/1.1                          Please transmit your root page, using HTTP 1.1,
Host: www.lth.se                        located at www.lth.se.
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux i686)    I am Mozilla 5.0, running on i686 Linux.
Accept: text/html                       I understand HTML-coded documents.
Accept-Language: sv, en-gb              I prefer pages in Swedish and British English.
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate          You may compress your content as gzip or deflate, if you wish.
Accept-Charset: utf-8, ISO-8859-1       I understand text encoded in Unicode and Latin-1.
                                        (Empty line signifies end of request)

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK                         Request is valid; I am complying according to HTTP 1.1 (code 200).
Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 10:33:59         The time (where I am) is 10:33 [...].
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)          I am Apache 2.2.3, running on Red Hat Linux.
Content-Length: 54283                   The content you requested is 54,283 bytes long.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8  Prepare to receive text encoded in Unicode, to be interpreted as HTML.
<html>                                  (The webpage www.lth.se/ follows)
  <head>
    <title>Some page title</title>
...

These are a few additional example responses that could also occur:

Response:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request                Request does not conform to HTTP/1.1, and I did not understand it.
                                        Please do not repeat the request in its current form.

Response:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found                  Request comforms with HTTP/1.1, but the resource requested was not found here.
                                        Please do not repeat the request for this resource.

Response:

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden                  Request is conformant and valid, but I refuse to comply under HTTP/1.1.
                                        Please do not repeat the request.

Request methods

HTTP clients can use one of eight request methods:

• HEAD
• GET
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE
• TRACE
• OPTIONS
• CONNECT

In practice, it is mainly the GET, POST and HEAD methods that are used in web applications, although protocols like WebDAV make use of others.

Status codes

An HTTP response (sent by a server in reply to an HTTP request) includes a status header, which informs the client whether the request succeeded. The status header is made up of a "status code" and a "reason phrase" (descriptive text).

Status codes classes

Status codes are grouped into classes:

• 1xx (informational) : Request received, continuing process
• 2xx (success) : The action was successfully received, understood, and accepted
• 3xx (redirect) : Further action must be taken in order to complete the request
• 4xx (client error) : The request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
• 5xx (server error) : The server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request.

For example, if the client requests a non-existent document, the status code will be "404 Not Found".

According to the W3C consortium :

HTTP applications are not required to understand the meaning of all registered status codes, though such understanding is obviously desirable. However, applications MUST understand the class of any status code, as indicated by the first digit, and treat any unrecognized response as being equivalent to the x00 status code of that class, with the exception that an unrecognized response MUST NOT be cached.

All W3C status codes

All the codes are described in RFC 2616.

HTTP header and cache management

The HTTP message header includes a number of fields used to facilitate cache management. One of these, Etag (entity tag) is a string valued field that represents a value that should (weak entity tag) or must (strong entity tag) change whenever the page (or other resource) is modified. This allows browsers or other clients to determine whether or not the entire resource needs to be downloaded. The HEAD method, which returns the same message header that would be included in the response to a GET request, can be used to determine if a cached copy of the resource is up to date without actually downloading a new copy. Other elements of the message header can be used, for example, to indicate when a copy should expire (no longer be considered valid), or that it should not be cached at all. This can be useful, for example, when data is generated dynamically (for example, the number of visits to a web site).

HTTP server operations

Multiple virtual servers may map onto a single physical computer. For effective server use, they must be on networks engineered to handle the traffic with them; see port scanning for Internet Service Provider checking for servers placed where traffic can create problems.